Cheating Part 2

So my Wife decided that she loves to play that game “Words with Friends” on the iPhone. It’s basically just like Scrabble but probably for legal reasons it’s just slightly different (bonus placement, tile value, etc… are different). Unfortunately for me, my Wife is scary smart and knows the English language far better than I. So I’m at a huge disadvantage when playing games that involve words or spelling. The only thing I’m good at is the math part, figuring out what the highest scoring word is… oh, yeah, and cheating. Well after a few dozen games, I kinda got fed up with the whole thing and started looking for ways to cheat. Sure, it’s probably talking an unencrypted protocol and it’s probably doing most of it’s validation checks on the client side, but my Wife is going to notice if I start using words that aren’t words.

So I start thinking about writing a tool that brute forces through the dictionary and attempts each word in a simulator to see if it’ll fit. Then the idea starts taking shape in the form of a program that starts tabulating which letters are worth what, and where the various double and triple word scores are in relation, etc… It grows in complexity further and further until I finally decide that I had better test it before I go much further. So on my first trial run it picks the word, “exine”. Okay, whatever, I plug it in and it works as expected. My Wife was on chat with me at the same time and instantly she writes, “Wtf is exine? You’re cheating.” So at this point I look up the word and sure enough it’s defined as “the outer coat of a spore, esp. a pollen grain” to which she write, “You totally cheated. You are so not a botanist. Spore my ass. Your mom is the outer coat of a spore. I don’t believe it for a second that you knew that word before playing it.”

Alas, all that work and she called me out the VERY first time I tried out my program. Of course in hindsight I should have parsed apart every word I had ever written in the blog or in my books and compared them against the dictionary to only use words that I was guaranteed to know. Such a waste. So I never got to try my other theories, about how to play defensively. For instance when I know there’s only a certain number of letters left in the deck of tiles, I can figure out which characters she can have left and the probability of which words she can play.

It would have been fun to create a contest to see which strategies are the most effective in a bot on bot scenario. Is an all defensive strategy better, or an all offensive (always opportunistically taking the highest value word)? Or maybe a hybrid of both where you play defensively at some points or offensively when you know it’s better in the long run. Anyway… unlike the previous cheating at Casino night it was not a very successful attempt. Like I said, my Wife knows that I cheat - she knows her adversary way too well. You win some, you lose some, I guess. That’s what I get for not marrying a bimbo.